OK, so I love brewing beer!

Why Beer?Several years before I began brewing beer, I started out making a few wines. Now, although I'm not the biggest fan of the flavor of it, I really enjoyed the process of making wine. You crush up a few grapes, sanitize the mixture, toss in a bit of sugar and yeast, and watch the fun! A few months later, you have something reasonably tasty (if you like that sort of thing) that you bottle up and begin to age. If you're not a very big fan of wine, like myself, you'll usually slowly give the wine away to family and friends who are fans of (free) wine, and then start to make preparations for your next batch of wine.Besides the obvious problem of not really enjoying the taste of what I was making, I was also faced with two other problems. The first was that the process was too easy. The second was that there was usually too long of a span of time between when I made wines. After all, once primary fermentation is over, so is the fun. The rest of the time is just racking and waiting for the wine to be ready to bottle.So, I moved on to making mead! I know, I know. Some of you more learned brewers are saying, "But mead is even easier to make than wine!" Others amongst you might be saying, "I thought you said you don't like wine! Mead is nothing more than honey wine!" Yeah, all of that is true. It's also true that making mead taps directly into your imagination, and you just can't help feeling like a Viking while you're doing it! I accept that mead mostly tastes like a good white wine, but some of the sweeter spiced meads really are quite delightful! In the end, though, I was still mostly sitting around waiting for mead to happen. I was also still giving away the vast bulk of what I was making. Mead is a fine drink to have occasionally, but it's not something you can hammer down during poker night. Especially if you don't want to lose your shirt during poker night!One day, a few months after Christmas, my wife came home from the store with a little surprise for me. Knowing how much I enjoyed the process of making wine and mead, she had picked up a Mr. Beer kit. I was immediately excited about trying something new. However, I'd never been a big fan of beer either. I mean, I drank enough (a lot) of beer when I was a party-every-night single guy, but it was always for effect, never for enjoyment. Being naive of other beer styles, I had always figured that Beer = Budweiser. Or Coors Light. Or Miller High Life. I really wasn't aware that there was a whole universe of beer that I was missing out on!So, I opened up the kit and was dismayed to find that the kit was very old. The dried malt extract had hardened like a brick. The yeast sachet had absorbed moisture and had a small hole punched through it. And even though I knew nothing about hops at the time, I was fairly certain that they weren't supposed to be brown colored and infused with the odor of grass and ripe parmesan cheese.I kept the plastic bottles for use with a mead I was making. The rest of the kit was tossed in with the rest of the garbage. My foray into extract beer brewing was over before it had ever begun. However, the old Mr. Beer kit had sparked in me a desire to learn more about the process of making beer.